Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 108
  2. The Karma of Perception
     … The Buddha’s message is that if you find you’re shaping them in a way that’s causing stress or suffering, you could shape them in another way. You could apply other perceptions. The trick is learning how to make the new perceptions stick. This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration. You’re holding a perception in mind, the perception … 
  3. A Safe Harbor
     … We do so many things that cause suffering not only for ourselves but also for other people. So who can you depend on? Where can you find true safety? It’s in response to that need for safety that the Buddha offered his teachings. On a relative level, there’s the safety of following the path, the safety it provides for you and for … 
  4. A Mind like Wind
     … Is that really true? Is it really beneficial? Is this really the right time to be thinking that thing? Why should I believe that story if it makes me suffer? In this way, you learn how to free yourself from a lot of influences that otherwise would take over your mind and then stay there ensconced for days on end. This ability to be … 
  5. The Basic Medicine
     … Everyone comes up here wounded in one way or another, suffering either from things outside or from things inside. At the time of the Buddha people were suffering from greed, anger, and delusion just as we are. With modern culture, modern society, it seems as if we have more diseases of the mind, more complex ways of getting involved in creating delusion, but they … 
  6. Here to Learn
     … The structure of the way in which each of us creates suffering is the same. Now, some of the details will be different, but the main structure in terms of the fact that the suffering is in the clinging; that the clinging comes from craving, the kind of craving that leads to more becoming; and that craving can be ended by following the path … 
  7. Perceptions & Potentials
     … We’re often told that the cause of suffering is wanting things to be different from what they are, but what they are is something you’re already making. The whole point of the path is that you can take your sense of the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, and you can turn them into something else. They don’t … 
  8. Selfing & Not-selfing
     … Whatever suffering you’re causing yourself right now will end when you achieve the goal. And you’ll find that a lot of suffering falls away, a lot of stress falls away, in the meantime, as you’re practicing. You can see this very clearly as you’re working with the breath. You begin to realize, as you breathe in, breathe out, that there … 
  9. Equanimity in Heart & Mind
     … Suppose you’re suffering from some distress about what’s happened in your life. The Buddha says that people’s normal reaction to that distress is to try to find some pleasure in the senses: nice sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, things that make you feel comfortable for a while. But then it’s so easy to slip back into the pain and … 
  10. Joy in Getting It Right
     … But wanting to see somebody suffer, no matter how bad that person has been in the past, does count as a form of ill will. So you’ve got to be careful. At the same time, you’re learning how to watch your mind. You learn what it means to create a mental state of goodwill. It’s not a natural expression of your … 
  11. Developing the Path
     … I suffered from that myself in the very beginning. I was pretty sure that if your mind got concentrated, you had to have visions. But there were no visions. I told myself that I must have wrong concentration. So I just threw away what I had and tried to find something else. It took me a while to realize the concentration was there. It … 
  12. Look after Yourself with Ease
     … You’re not suffering, so why would you want anybody else to suffer? This is why the Buddha said that the practice of right resolve shades into right concentration. When you’re here with the breath—or whatever your object of concentration—there are no thoughts of sensuality, no thoughts of ill will, and no thoughts of harmfulness. So it’s the embodiment of … 
  13. Use Your Defilements
     … And it’s okay to be averse to suffering. You make use of these defilements in the same way that you build that raft in the image of going across the river. You don’t wait for the nibbana yacht to come over, pick you up, and take you back to the deathless. You work with the trees and twigs and branches on this … 
  14. What’s Not on the Map
     … It’s not that all life is suffering. Part of life is also the end of suffering—if you open yourself up to what often might seem like impossibilities, improbabilities. There’s a passage where the Buddha says that we practice to see what we’ve never seen before, to attain what we’ve never attained before, to know what we’ve never known … 
  15. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … He kept holding to that question, “Is there something deathless? Is there some way to get to the end of suffering?” So, he applied his mind to other questions. “What is it that causes all these different rebirths?” He saw that it was karma. And again, he could have set himself up as a teacher, teaching about karma and rebirth. But he realized that … 
  16. The Psychology of Self
     … He just taught that there are things we tend to identify with which cause suffering, and we’d be better off if we let go of them, if we didn’t identify with them. His teaching was “not-self,” not “no self.” Secondly, as an important first step, he taught all the basic principles that modern psychologists now say contribute to a healthy self … 
  17. A Good-natured Attitude
     … The ancient Greeks used to say, “It’s the gods who laugh.” Human beings struggle and suffer on Earth, but the gods are sitting up on Mount Olympus. Because they’re a little bit disengaged, they can look down and see what’s happening and have a sense of humor about the whole thing. It may sound cruel when one person is laughing at … 
  18. To Have a Purpose
     … So you’ve got the potential for what you need to put an end to suffering and to get to the other side of the river, because that’s one of the things that the word pāramī for “perfection” means. The Buddha’s image is of being on an unsafe shore of a river and seeing that the other shore of the river is … 
  19. Perceptions for Training the Mind
    In the Buddha’s analysis of the causes of suffering and stress, fabrication comes right after ignorance, the message being that if you fabricate in ignorance, you’re going to suffer. But if you fabricate with knowledge, it becomes the path—and that’s what we’re doing as we sit here and meditate. We’re learning how to fabricate with knowledge. We reflect … 
  20. Cut the Currents
     … There is suffering here in the clinging, and it’s caused by these actions. There’s a path of action that can lead to the end of suffering by abandoning the actions that cause it. You’ll have to take on an identity of someone who actually wants to pursue that path, but that’s an identity you can let go once the path … 
  21. Developed in Body & Mind
     … As the Buddha said, as long as you haven’t reached the end of suffering, don’t be satisfied with your level of skill. See what you can do to learn more. We’re practicing mindfulness, alertness, ardency, trying to bring them all together at the breath. You’re trying to bring the mind into concentration, but you don’t think the word “concentration … 
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